“Colleges across the country are committing consumer fraud. … College boards and administrators are only able to pull this off because they have a ‘dirty little secret.’ That secret is that the faculty who are actually responsible for educating these students are underpaid part-time faculty and overworked full-time faculty.” That’s according to a recent post on the AFT Face blog.

I read that comment the other day, and thought the nod to “consumer fraud” was original. (There is nothing so dangerous as a flock of fleeced consumers.) The “dirty little secret” reference is hackneyed. Then I read the final sentence about “underpaid part-time faculty” and “overworked full-time faculty.” There they were, the twins, separated at graduation, linked in tragic professional camaraderie. How quaint.

However, there is also an insidious intimation in the link being made that our nation’s full-time faculty members are “overworked” because there are scads of adjuncts. Full-time faculty members suffer because non-tenure-track faculty members don’t help with the heavy lifting that is advising, governance, curricular decisions, and committee work. One Chronicle blogger recently wrote that it would be “unfair” to expect adjuncts to fulfill the same duties as full-time faculty members.

Unfair? Unfair is you zipping into my parking spot while I put my car into reverse. Not expecting adjunct instructors to fulfill the same duties as full-time faculty members is criminal. Allowing and requiring adjuncts to fulfill the same duties as full timers is the only way that non-tenure-track faculty members will ever be able to make compelling arguments for converting part-time postions into full-time lines, for pro-rata pay, and for power-sharing.

Non-tenure-track faculty members are being kept out of faculty senates, shut out of faculty governance, and excluded from committees by those in power because faculty governance in higher education has devolved into a classic example of minority rule. Imagine if faculty-senate seats were distributed proportionately at your college. Perhaps adjuncts would immediately have control of the senate. The same would be true of other governance and committee assignments. Due to their numbers, adjuncts could and would, quite possibly, overrule and outvote tenured and tenure-track faculty members on all sorts of issues. To some, that would be akin to the inmates running the asylum.

Now, though, we’re being told that minority rule in higher education is, well, exhausting and difficult to manage for the remaining tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Their advocates trumpet the “vast” differences between them and their part-time counterparts.

Such rhetoric isn’t going to play well outside the ivory tower. If tenure-track faculty members are overworked, it is because they choose to be, in exchange for earning median salaries that are, on average, higher — sometimes significantly — than the $28,567 median income for workers in the United States. The “overworked” rhetoric smacks of hubris, and shows a vast disconnect between faculty members and the people who pay to send their children to college.

To paraphrase many of the critics of “exploited” adjunct faculty who have commented on my blog postings: Only a fool stays in a job where he/she is treated badly. Well, an “overworked” full-time faculty member is little more than a fool with tenure.

In reality, 450,000 tenure-track and tenured faculty members are being carried to the summit of a profession quite comfortably on the backs of 700,000 unfairly compensated, disenfranchised, and underappreciated temporary faculty sherpas. Complaining about the tiresome ride is just bad manners.